


Deviant

by berlynn_wohl



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Asexual!Sherlock, Asexuality, First Time, Kink Meme, M/M, Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-27
Updated: 2011-07-27
Packaged: 2017-10-26 09:37:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/281501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/berlynn_wohl/pseuds/berlynn_wohl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Stay away from Sherlock Holmes."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deviant

A/N: This story is a  [ fill for a prompt ](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/10038.html?thread=49679158#t49679158) on the kinkmeme. Anon asked for an AU where asexuality is the norm. Sherlock is asexual, John is not.

 

  


1.

The first seven deductions are simple, and excite Sherlock not at all: Military. Doctor, trained at Bart’s. In need of a flat-share. Estranged from family. Drunk sibling. War injury, either Afghanistan or Iraq. Limp is psychosomatic.

The eighth deduction is different. While John waits to get his phone back, he gives Molly and then Sherlock himself what he believes are surreptitious appraising glances. He looks down and away an instant later, knowing what he’s done is wrong, is sick. Molly does not notice. Mike does not notice. Because they are idiots. Sherlock’s pulse is racing now. Mike thinks he has only brought Sherlock a flatmate. He has actually delivered weeks, months, _years_ worth of research, data collection, experiments.

Sherlock steps close to John to hand back the mobile. He tugs at his shirt, pushing some of his body heat and scent out from the collar. John has a defect, a genetic anomaly, that makes him susceptible to pheromones. Though he is sure he already has his new flatmate lock, stock, and barrel, Sherlock tries to waft his smell toward John, in case he needs further enticement.

 

2.

“Stay away from Sherlock Holmes,” says Sally. She does not know the exact truth about John, but she knows Sherlock is obsessed with perversion, so she assumes John is some sort of pervert, and thus should not be hanging about and encouraging Sherlock.

 

3.

“Stay away from Sherlock Holmes,” says Mycroft. He does know the truth about John. He worries about his brother, constantly. Consorting with people like John, who are afflicted, could be dangerous.

 

4.

John takes a job at a Nursery, running quality control checks on embryos in the organogenesis stage. It is tedious. He doesn’t mind. He needs to spend some time away from Sherlock. The dashing about and tracking down bad guys is fun, but he finds Sherlock so arousing, it’s painful to be around him sometimes. Sherlock is perfectly aware that he is a genius, and that John admires his intellect, but is oblivious to the other charms he possesses. John is a quiet as a mouse in his bedroom, when he pleasures himself to thoughts of his flatmate, but he is afraid Sherlock knows everything.

 

5.

Sherlock wants to know everything. He wants to know if sexual people eat differently. He wants to know what they read, what music they listen to, how they behave when they find someone who arouses them. He wants to know what they get up to when they manage to locate each other. He wants to know because a disproportionate amount of criminals and suicides are sexual people, so learning about them will help him with his Work. He is not worried that John might be a criminal. He can easily perceive that John is so afraid and ashamed of being sexual, he will always toe the line, for fear of his secret being exposed.

 

6.

It turns out, sexual people are not so different from normal people. At least, if John is anything to go by. They watch telly, buy milk, write in their blogs. Sherlock wonders how things would change if the public knew that sexual people were just like them, except for the wanting-to-have-sex bit.

Sherlock is now obsessed with the wanting-to-have-sex bit. He wants to know if the books he’s read are accurate. And he wants to know more than he wants to respect his flatmate’s privacy.

When John returns home one evening, Sherlock asks him, “Can you keep a secret?” He takes John to his bookshelf, removes a row of books that turn out to be several spines and two covers, taped together. Behind these innocuously-titled spines, another row of books: _Sexual People_. _How Humans Have Sex_. _Erotic Desire in the Male_. _Erotic Desire in the Female_. And a thin, battered pamphlet, “A Plea For Understanding.” These publications are all fifty years old or more. They were published during a revolutionary period in the field of psychology, when certain maverick scholars began to suggest that human sexuality was not a “perversion,” and that it should not be classified as a mental illness. These ideas, progressive though usually still condescending towards sexual people, were summarily quashed by the establishment, but some of the literature survived the purge, and Sherlock is one of Britain’s most avid collectors.

John’s jaw drops when he sees the books. He’s not so much shocked that Sherlock has them. Sherlock has a lot of unusual possessions. Rather, he’s stunned to finally see those titles he’d heard whispered years ago at Bart’s and at King’s College. He remembers the speculation about whether any extant copies remained, and had longed to get his hands on them, to receive any affirmation at all that the things he felt, the urges he had, were, if not normal, at least not evil.

He puts his hand out. “May I?” Rather than let him take one from the shelf, Sherlock picks out _Erotic Desire in the Male_ and puts it in John’s hands. “You must sit on the sofa with me while you read this, and as you read you must tell me how much is true.”

They sit, and John opens the book. Sherlock says, “One of these books, I can’t remember which, speculates that as many as one in twenty people may be sexual.” When he sees the hopeful look on John’s face, he adds, “Oh, perhaps I should mention, I’m not one of them.”

John turns the yellowed pages with care, comparing and contrasting aloud, his own experiences and inner thoughts versus the text. Long after the sun sets and the room grows too dark to read off the pages, Sherlock asks questions out of his own head, and John answers everything. He explains what it’s like to have an erection. He tries to describe the hot, tingling feelings he gets when he imagines certain people with no clothes on. The bright light behind his eyes during orgasm. How desire feels, the burning in his chest and groin for the lips and tongues of others, for warm hands that are not his own.

Just about the only thing he does not reveal was his craving for Sherlock. He assumes Sherlock is already aware, and there’s no need to further embarrass himself by confessing it.

He is wrong.

 

7.

Sherlock encounters a major setback when John meets Sebastian. The bastard lets slip that Sherlock used to amuse himself at uni by identifying and outing fellow students who were taking advantage of the permissive atmosphere by experimenting with sexuality. That was years ago, and it had only been an exercise. It had nothing to do with morality, or Sherlock’s opinion of sexual people. But this sets Sherlock’s experiment back weeks.

When things have settled down and there are no murderous circus performers to occupy his thoughts, he gently suggests that John show him his penis while it is erect. John flatly refuses, certain now that it is a setup. He might lose his job, if anyone found out that he’d had an erection.

 

8.

To regain John’s favour, Sherlock buys the milk every week for a month, and takes John to crime scenes with him.

Occasionally, he asks, “Will you show me your erect penis?” But John still refuses, accusing Sherlock of trying to blackmail him. But then one day, Sherlock asks, and John says, “Yes, on one condition.” He has thought of a way to test Sherlock’s loyalty, and get something out of it himself.

“I’ll do it,” he says, “if you also take your clothes off.”

Sherlock says, “Deal.”

John and Sherlock take off their clothes. They do not know how they should do this, so they just sit side by side on the sofa. John does not have an erection, because he is nervous. He suggests that Sherlock instead recline with his back against the arm of the sofa. Then John turns ninety degrees, kneeling between Sherlock’s legs.

Now Sherlock is spread before him, like those pictures he and a friend snuck a look at when they were fifteen. John is delighted.

Sherlock is delighted. A sexual man is looming over him, and that man is getting an erection. It’s close enough that Sherlock could reach out and touch it. It’s so dangerous and deviant and exciting. Sherlock would do anything to have something to be this excited about all the time.

Their soft, panting breaths are filling the space between them; their pulses are pounding in their ears. John lets Sherlock look his fill. Then Sherlock pleads: “Touch yourself.”

John is still suspicious. He says, “Only if you touch yourself as well.”

“It wouldn’t do any good,” Sherlock says.

“I don’t mean masturbate. I mean put your hands on your body. Touch your skin.”

Both Sherlock’s palms come to rest on his belly. They slowly slide up, catching slightly on each rib, then caress his flat pink nipples. They skate back down, and Sherlock crosses his arms, stroking each with the opposite hand, to the shoulders and back, hugging himself.

John utters a little noise, a gasp, and tugs at himself in earnest. He thinks his heart might burst.

“What does it feel like,” Sherlock asks clinically. The fingers of his right hand trail up and down his thigh, while the left strokes his throat.

“Addictive,” John says. “The more I touch it, the more I want to touch it. Until…”

“Until what?”

John’s fist is a blur, now, and with his other hand he clutches his balls, rolling and massaging them. He can’t help it. In seconds, he is trembling, then becomes very still, except for his fist. The noise he makes is bestial. He milks himself onto the inside of Sherlock’s left thigh.

Sherlock has had other people’s blood on his bare skin before. Also their tears, pus, and snot. But this is new. He doesn’t flinch. He looks at it briefly, then goes back to watching John, who has sat back on his heels, bracing himself with one arm on the back of the sofa. The fluid drips down Sherlock’s thigh and onto the upholstery.

John is humiliated that Sherlock did not get aroused. But then, it was foolish of him to hope that would happen in the first place.

A curious Sherlock runs his fingers through the mess on his thigh. He wishes he had a vial handy. He says, “How soon can you do it again?”

  


9.

The crisp, yellowed pages of the books in Sherlock’s secret collection become slightly worn, their corners blunted, as the years pass. Whenever the criminal element in London is lax in their duties and Sherlock is bored, he chooses a book from behind the false row of spines, shows John a particular page, and says, “Can we do this?”

John says, “That’s a pathology textbook, Sherlock, not an instruction manual.”

But he always relents.


End file.
